Hendrix and Handel Slept Here: A Museum’s Strange Bedfellows

Jimi Hendrix in 1969 in the apartment he shared with Kathy Etchingham in the Mayfair section of London, now part of the Handel & Hendrix museum.CreditCreditBarrie Wentzell

By Farah Nayeri

June 23, 2016

LONDON — In the summer of 1968, fresh from a year of touring and recording, Jimi Hendrix rented a small apartment in London with his British girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, and decorated it himself in a style that might be described today as hippie chic.

Hendrix pinned shawls to a wall, piled rugs on the floor and decked the mantel with ostrich feathers. The couple spent lazy afternoons in the apartment, at 23 Brook Street in Mayfair, playing board games, listening to records and watching episodes of the television saga “Coronation Street.”

The apartment was next door to the former home of a German-born composer as famous in his day as Hendrix was in the late 1960s: Georg Frideric Handel. Handel lived in the Georgian house at 25 Brook Street for 36 years, from 1723 until his death, and since 2001, it has operated as a museum. The trust behind the museum also holds the lease on the upper floors of No. 23, and in February, Hendrix’s apartment, recreated with period artifacts and reproductions, opened to the public in an unlikely coupling of the Baroque and the psychedelic.

Ms. Etchingham, now 70, acted as a consultant on the project, which cost about 2.4 million pounds, or about $3.5 million. The museum — now called Handel & Hendrix in London — expects to welcome about 50,000 visitors in its first year, up from 20,000 annually when it was just Handel’s house.

The opening of the Hendrix wing has allowed the museum to reach younger audiences and “become a house that celebrates music,” said Michelle Aland, the director and chief executive of Handel & Hendrix, which has also added a 40-seat studio for teaching and performing music.

“We’ve moved from just Baroque and Handel to rock ’n’ roll to music in general,” Ms. Aland said.

It was Ms. Etchingham, who now lives in Melbourne, Australia, who found the £30-a-week apartment through a newspaper ad in June 1968. The immediate neighbors were shops and businesses, so the landlord had no objections renting to a rock musician, she said in a telephone interview.

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Ms. Etchingham, 70, in the restored bedroom she once shared with Hendrix in London.CreditAndy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency

The couple had met in September 1966 at Scotch of St. James, a nightclub where Ms. Etchingham, then a hairdresser and D.J., previously worked. A no-nonsense 20-year-old, she was a habitué of the music scene: She knew members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and had once danced with David Bowie.

Yet she was mesmerized by Hendrix, who was building his reputation with blistering live shows in the city’s clubs.

“I’d never seen anybody like him before, and neither had anyone else,” Ms. Etchingham recalled. “He was very, very funny, and amusing, and good company.” His flamboyant performances, in which he occasionally lit his guitar on fire, were “all an act,” she said: “What he did on the stage, he didn’t do privately.”

The centerpiece of the museum’s Hendrix wing is his colorful living room, which contains an oval wood-framed mirror in which he combed his hair (a loan from Ms. Etchingham). Everything else — the furniture and fabrics, the floral lampshade, the Bakelite phones, the refrigerator-size speakers — has either been reproduced or sourced at auctions of 1960s memorabilia.

Hendrix picked thick turquoise velvet curtains (designed to keep the light out, given how late the couple slept); these have now been made to match in more or less the same shade. His flame-red carpeting has been replicated from a tuft of the original that was found stuck on a nail. The pink-and-orange striped bedspread is also exactly as it was, Ms. Etchingham said; it was rewoven based on the original, owned by the Hard Rock Cafe.

A vintage match has even been found for a British Overseas Airways Corporation travel bag containing his guitar-repair kit. (The original sold at auction in 2014 for £10,625, or about $15,740.)

The museum also has a room with wall-to-wall album covers representing Hendrix’s record collection, and a central foyer (once part of Handel’s attic) with explanatory texts and photographs, as well as videos that include a fuzzy color clip in which Hendrix plays “Hound Dog” while Ms. Etchingham and others wiggle to the beat. An Epiphone FT79 guitar that he plays in the clip is displayed in the foyer, on loan from its owner.

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23 Brook Street, at left, and 25 Brook Street, where George Frederick Handel resided, next to it. The site is now a combination visitor attraction.CreditPhillip Reed

Hendrix was tidy, Ms. Etchingham recalled: He always made the bed, and “didn’t have a situation where he had socks all over the place or anything like that.”

When Hendrix wasn’t in the United States recording or touring, the couple would often spend afternoons in a record store, where he would choose albums because of a particular riff or set of chords and sometimes listen to them only once or twice. He bought the Bee Gees’ first album because of the harmonies, Ms. Etchingham said, and Handel’s “Messiah” when he learned of the Brook Street connection.

Otherwise, the couple played Monopoly, watched TV and ordered hamburgers and bottles of Mateus rosé from the downstairs restaurant. Ms. Etchingham also poured Hendrix cups of tea, a beverage he sneered at initially. At night, musicians and performers swarmed the apartment to watch Hendrix play, and braver ones — like the jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk — would join in. Some guests would stay the night, Ms. Etchingham said; George Harrison once slept in the upstairs room.

“There were no wild parties — no, never,” she said, emphasizing that the only drug in the house was marijuana. “There were friends coming around, people playing music, bringing their instruments, doing a bit of jamming.”

Ms. Etchingham and Hendrix stayed together for nearly three years; she is cited as the inspiration for songs including “The Wind Cries Mary.” (Mary is her middle name.)

After Hendrix started taking heavier drugs, the couple split up. “Somewhere along the line, I realized that this is not going to be anything that I’d want long term,” she said.

Ms. Etchingham has played a role in Hendrix’s legacy since his death in 1970 in London. She campaigned to have English Heritage, a charity that oversees historic sites in England, install a plaque on the building in 1997, paving the way for the museum. In 1998 she published a memoir recounting their relationship, “Through Gypsy Eyes.”

Did Ms. Etchingham ever have a sense that she was living with a genius? “No,” she said. “I couldn’t have foreseen that nobody else would have come along as good.”